


Z Is For Zucker, Zeitgeist, and Ground Zero

by ivorygates



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alphabet Soup Challenge, Episode Related, Episode: s03e06 Point of View, Gen, POV Outsider, Quantum Mirror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-10-23
Packaged: 2019-01-30 11:37:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12652794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: Master Sergeant David A. Zucker had an impeccable service record.  So what was he doing guarding a warehouse in Lincoln County, Nevada?





	Z Is For Zucker, Zeitgeist, and Ground Zero

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for S3e6: "Point Of View" if you squint.

Master Sergeant David A Zucker had an impeccable service record. He had checked off all the important boxes since enlisting in the Air Force at the ripe old age of 21: Overseas Deployment, Jump School at Benning, AFSOC Special Tactics. He was ambitious, but not for money and power: when a whiff of a more elite unit appeared on his radar, he did everything possible to get into the pipeline. Since he was as stubborn as he was highly-trained, he made the cut.

So what was he doing guarding a warehouse in Lincoln County, Nevada? (Hey, at least his wife liked living in Vegas.)

People in his line of work didn't get detailed explanations, and asking questions could be a career killer. While the task seemed senseless, he took comfort from the knowledge that he was an extremely expensive piece of government property, and they wouldn't have him doing rent-a-cop shit if it was as far below his pay-grade as it seemed.

And after all, the warehouse—one of three—was at Area 53 in Paradise Ranch. And the Ranch was at Groom Lake.

Groom Lake tested, among other things, the warfighting capabilities of enemy aircraft, so Zuck was familiar with the location in a more than pop cultural way, but he'd never seen this particular sub-installation: an office building, two warehouses, a hangar, and a line shack where security could sign in, sign out, and get coffee on their breaks. It was an eight hour shift, which—in practice—boiled down to three two-man, two-hour patrols (Perimeter, Site One, Site Two, and if he was a really good boy he'd get to guard the hangar or even the office building), with a 20-minute break between them. The total on-site security force was roughly twenty people each shift (those numbers alone were enough to tell him Area 53 was Big Juju), and all of them very well armed. (ROE said "lethal force at shift commander's discretion.") Shift assignments were rotated in a three to six week window: Zuck was currently pulling the 2300-0700 slot, which had the advantage of being peaceful. Whoever it was that worked in the building sometimes worked late, something he only knew from the chatter, as the building never showed lights.

In fact, _nothing_ here ever showed lights.

It was, of course, possible that he was guarding a weapons cache of particular interest to the Bad Guys, but if so, the stuff had the best camouflage he'd ever seen, because it all looked like it came out of a junk shop of some kind (at least the stuff that wasn't crated). There were big silver balls, all kinds of weird things that looked more like chairs than they did anything else, racks of weird costumes, and—most inexplicable of all—rocks. Big rocks, little rocks, tall rocks, flat rocks.

Rocks that glowed.

The first time he saw it, Zuck put the glow down to "new guy" hazing. Nobody talked about personal stuff—places they'd been and things they'd done—but that didn't mean they didn't talk. Rumors and legends about the which and why of the here and now, because that was common knowledge and it didn't give anything away. So before Zuck had been on-site even a week, he'd learned that Site One and Site Two were haunted, or full of things that were haunted, or maybe used to belong to CIA-NID-DIA-NSA-ONSI or even 25 AF (Zuck had won the pool for naming the most US intelligence agencies; he had a good head for trivia). Things happened. People vanished. Zuck decided not to think about the first one until he saw it, and the second one never. A lot of people vanished in his line of work.

The two-man security teams were assembled at random. The night Zuck saw the rock glow, he was partnered with Dave Kalanithi, aka Nits. Nits was a six-months veteran; he said the max tour here was 18 months before you got moved on up to the Big Job. Or else washed out. Zuck had his own thoughts about who was going to make that cut, and Nits wasn't on the list. It stood to reason this duty was the last stage of the screening process, and there were times he wondered what they were looking for. He was pretty sure it wasn't guys who gossiped with New Guys about why they were all here. Zuck kept his thoughts to himself.

Site One and Site Two covered an acre or so, and there wasn't any climate control, so it was a lot like doing a shift in an oven. By the time two hours were up, you were glad to get outside. There was a door on each side of the building, and you went in through a different one each time. Then it was a walk around the inside walls, then a walk up and down each aisle, then another perimeter check. The teams patrolled about half an aisle apart, so that one would catch what the other one missed. It was actually possible to get turned around on patrol, so Zuck had picked out landmarks and memorized them in order. He gave them names, too. Octopus Coffin. Piggy Bank. Zombie Tree. Things like that.

Black Rock was just shy of seven feet tall, about five feet wide, and roughly a foot deep. It looked like a slice of geode (Zuck's youngest was a rockhound) except for how it didn't: a couple of the interior angles were straight-edged, and it had a flat solid back. It still looked more like a rock than it looked like anything else, though.

The first time he saw it glow, he was at the North Door. Black Rock was halfway down the north-outside aisle. He'd been just about to ask Nits which of them should go first when there was a flash of light—blue like the lights in a swimming pool at night—and in their glow he could see Black Rock outlined in their glow, as if the light was coming from the far side.

Both of them headed for it at a dead run, but by the time he and Nits reached it, Black Rock was dark again.

He glanced at Nits. Nits looked at him. "We will never speak of this again," Nits intoned solemnly, and Zuck nodded.

Black Rock wasn't the only thing that glowed, or even the only thing that _did something_. Some times he'd hear snatches of music and even voices. The big balls would light up a little and then fade out, and once—when the power went out and the backup system hadn't come on line yet—he'd stood in the pitch dark with Airman First Class Ryan Paltrow and watched what looked like ball lightning dance along the top of the racks. But Black Rock did it most. When it lit up, it was visible from a couple of aisles away. Just Zuck's bad luck never to be on the business side of the thing when it switched on.

He had not yet gotten to the point of deciding whether or not he actually wanted to get a better look at Black Rock's glow when the _thing_ happened.

His CO had told him that his performance review would probably be a bit more hands on than he was used to. Zuck thought that was great, because it meant a step closer to the program he was actually interested in. So maybe he didn't have his head in the game as much as he should have when it happened.

He was just turning down the next aisle when Black Rock lit up again. The blue lights flared red, and he could hear—impossibly—the sound of gunfire. As he and his partner headed back the way he'd come at a dead run, Site One lit up with its own red lights and sirens.

There were two people in North Aisle who hadn't been there thirty seconds ago.

"Drop your weapons! Do it now!"

One of the tangos was somebody's mom—blond hair and a white sweater—but the other one was a grunt in full rattle. Zuck could hear the Armed Emergency Response Team burst through the North Door and close up behind him just as Blonde Mommy turned around and carefully laid something on the floor before straightening up and raising her hands. She looked more pissed off than scared.

"I'm Dr. Samantha Carter from the SGA. This is Major Kawalsky. We need to speak to your commander."

#

Four hours later, Master Sergeant David A Zucker, Blonde Mommy, and Grunt—along with a few other people—were wheels-up for Peterson.

Three hours after that, Master Sergeant David A Zucker got a first-hand look at his next post.

#


End file.
